Sixteenth-Century Ireland (New Gill History of Ireland 2)

The Incomplete Conquest – Irish Landlords and the Extension of English Royal Power

Colm Lennon

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780717160402
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Colm Lennon's Sixteenth-Century Ireland, the second instalment in the New Gill History of Ireland series, looks at how the Tudor conquest of Ireland by Henry VIII and the country's colonisation by Protestant settlers led to the incomplete conquest of Ireland, laying the foundations for the sectarian conflict that persists to this day. In 1500, most of Ireland lay outside the ambit of English royal power. Only a small area around Dublin, The Pale, was directly administered by the crown. The rest of the island was run in more or less autonomous fashion by Anglo-Norman magnates or Gaelic chieftains. By 1600, there had been a huge extension of English royal power. First, the influence of the semi-independent magnates was broken; second, in the 1590s crown forces successfully fought a war against the last of the old Gaelic strongholds in Ulster. The secular conquest of Ireland was, therefore, accomplished in the course of the century. But the Reformation made little headway. The Anglo-Norman community remained stubbornly Catholic, as did the Gaelic nation. Their loss of political influence did not result in the expropriation of their lands. Most property still remained in Catholic hands. England's failure to effect a revolution in church as well as in state meant that the conquest of Ireland was incomplete. The seventeenth century, with its wars of religion, was the consequence.

Sixteenth-Century Ireland: Table of Contents

Introduction

• Town and County in the English Part of Ireland, c.1500
• Society and Culture in Gaelic Ireland
• The Kildares and their Critics
• Kildare Power and Tudor Intervention, 1520–35
• Religion and Reformation, 1500–40
• Political and Religious Reform and Reaction, 1536–56
• The Pale and Greater Leinster, 1556–88
• Munster: Presidency and Plantation, 1565–95
• Connacht: Council and Composition, 1569–95
• Ulster and the General Crisis of the Nine Years' War, 1560–1603
• From Reformation to Counter-Reformation, 1560–1600

1

Town and County in the English Part of Ireland, c. 1500

TOWNS and their hinterlands were a vibrant aspect of early sixteenth-century Ireland. Urban centres of varying size had been foci of social, cultural and economic development within the island since the arrival of the Normans and even before. Agrarian manor and town were inextricably linked, as most Irish commerce, both domestic and foreign, was based on the productivity of farmlands. The older port towns, such as Dublin, Waterford and Cork, owed their vitality to the Vikings with their far-flung trading network, while the newer centres (sometimes revitalised older ones) such as Clonmel and Kilkenny grew under seignorial patronage as boroughs on fertile manors. While some boroughs may have lapsed into marcher outposts, cut off from once productive hinterlands, they retained vestigial market functions. Antipathy to Gaelic clans and institutions was frequently expressed by citizens and compellingly manifested in their hostings and ‘roads’ into Gaelic districts. This was partly a reflection of the European town-dwellers’ rejection of non-settled pastoralism and oppressive militarism. Yet despite official municipal disavowal of ties with Gaelic clanspeople, there were very many points of contact, not just for goods but of personnel and ideas, and in this context the semi-strangulated manorial boroughs no less than the more thriving municipalities were significant.¹

Recent historical writings on later medieval Ireland have acknowledged the importance of the role of towns, with their hinterlands, in much of Ireland. Although perhaps not as numerous or as large as in the earlier Anglo-Norman period, urban centres are seen to have had well-ordered polities, clusters of wealthy families which profited from trade and rents, thriving spiritual institutions, and the dynamism to draw into their nexus through markets and fairs the people and produce of the vicinities. During the later Middle Ages the central administration came to rely heavily on the towns and cities as cynosures of Englishness. The citizens spoke English, dressed in English style and lived in houses designed in the fashion of dwellings in cities in England. Not only were the customs and institutions of towns modelled closely on those of the mother country, but the prevailing mentality of the inhabitants within urban precincts was civic and commercial. For close to the heart of most substantial towns was the merchant guild with its strict rules for trade, expressive ritual and powerful personnel who were interchangeable with the ruling city councillors.²

While about 250 urban settlements may have been founded or refurbished down to the fourteenth century, there were only fifty towns of some size around 1500. Many of the medieval boroughs never prospered, failing to attract burgesses or suffering inordinately from the effects of warfare or plague. Others may have attained the status of large villages with populations of a few hundred. Although the exact size of the towns in the early sixteenth century cannot be known with certainty, the number suggested here would perhaps yield an urban population of at least fifty thousand. Accepting Kenneth Nicholls’s estimate of a total population of the island of half a million at most, it can be posited that ten per cent of the inhabitants were urban-dwellers, a figure in line with the proportion for England and other European countries at that time. As the lowlands and river valleys in Leinster and Meath were the most urbanised as well as the most densely peopled areas of the country, the economic, social and cultural functions of towns influenced a large section of the entire population. Connacht and Ulster had comparatively few towns, but even in these provinces there were commercial connections between ports such as Galway, Sligo, Carrickfergus and Carlingford and the interior through proto-urban settlements and lesser havens. In certain regions groups of towns, such as Drogheda, Dundalk and Ardee in north Leinster, and Waterford, Carrick and Clonmel in Ormond country, had close trading links.³

In order to qualify for the appellation ‘town’, centres of at least several hundred inhabitants needed to have exhibited some or all of these features: corporate administration, topographical complexity (including walls and defensive works and perhaps suburban growth), market functions, institutions of spiritual and secular care such as hospitals or poorhouses, and interplay with rural vicinages of varying extents. In common with towns in contemporary England, Irish boroughs seem to have been passing through a phase of relative decline in the late Middle Ages: Dublin Castle was ruinous in 1521, for example, the bridge at Drogheda had collapsed in 1472, and fires in Dundalk (in 1430, 1444 and 1452), Navan (in 1539), Athboy (in 1443), Clonmel (in 1516) and Sligo (on many occasions) retarded urban growth. Many walls and fortifications, symbols of urban pride as well as protective bastions, were the subject of special grants and remissions through the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Within these enclosures (varying from under twenty acres in some of the small Ormond boroughs to over 140 acres in the case of Dublin) shrinkage of streetscapes had occurred from the mid-fourteenth century, and population losses had never been made good. Yet although major public construction works fell victim to scarcity of municipal funds, private wealth fostered the building of residences and chantry chapels. And despite the decay of commercial facilities such as bridges, harbours and wharves in some centres, and the diminution of direct control over immediate vicinities, townspeople could extend their trading and cultural hinterlands by imaginative enterprises over varying distances and sensible accommodation with potentially hostile neighbours.⁴

TOWNS AND THEIR RULING GROUPS

The growth of Irish medieval towns had been fostered by royal and aristocratic grants, but in 1500 most major urban centres aspired to self-government, with varying degrees of success. The old Viking ports of Drogheda, Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick, along with Galway, had developed quasi-autonomous powers after three centuries of royal beneficence in the form of charters and statutory regulations. The main aims of the royal or seignorial benefactors of urban settlements were to support trade through establishing settled market centres and fairs and to advance manufacture and crafts. Administrative and judicial institutions complemented economic ones. While many small boroughs failed to grow into towns through population failure or wastage due to war, those which did, such as Thurles, County Tipperary, and Kells, County Meath, evolved into sizeable centres, accumulating additional grants from the crown or local lords. In towns, even of the first rank such as Limerick and Galway, which had to contend with overweening local nobles—the O’Briens and the Clanricard Burkes respectively in those cases—municipal privilege compromised with local powers, especially when remote from the centre of English power. For the most part, however, petitions from urban centres to the crown for relief of municipal distress were received sympathetically at the royal court in London.⁵

The most common grants to importunate boroughs in the late fifteenth century were of the remission of all or part of the fee-farm rent payable by the larger towns to the crown, and of murage, enabling civic communities to make use of customs and tolls on trade for paving streets and repairing walls and utilities. Both forms of concession attest the reality of civic privilege and responsibility in the late Middle Ages. The principal features of citizenship in Ireland as elsewhere were the privilege of trading within the borough franchises on preferential terms and the freedom from feudal levies and taxes. Concomitant was the communal right to self-regulation in legal and other matters. The highly prized order of citizenship entailed the responsibilities of paying rent in the form of fee-farms or burgage, contributing to civic cesses and levies, upholding the monopolies and rights of the guilds, and generally participating in the administration of the borough. While admission to citizenship in the smaller settlements may not have involved a formal procedure, entry into the ranks of freemen of larger towns was strictly regulated through apprenticeship in the guilds, marriage to a citizen, heredity or special grace and favour. The leading municipalities such as Waterford or Drogheda had fairly rigidly defined barriers between the free and the unfree, the latter dwelling within the franchises on sufferance. Above all, however, the municipal advancement of the late fifteenth-century Irish town is reflected in the nature of its conciliar government.⁶

The six principal boroughs reached the summit of their municipal autonomy in the decades around 1500. A series of charters of privileges had brought de facto incorporation, which meant that the ruling councils were recognised by the crown as proper corporations. The bigger the municipality the more complex were the conciliar structures. Twenty-four aldermen, forty-eight sheriffs’ peers and ninety-six guildsmen or ‘numbers’ formed the tiers of the common council in the borough of Dublin, and twenty-three aldermen and fourteen commons made up the ranks of that body in Drogheda. In the cities the senior councillors or aldermen monopolised power by 1500 at the expense of the commons, who usually represented the non-mercantile craft guilds. Municipal courts, comprising the senior councillors with their legal appointees, or the sheriffs or provosts, adjudicated on all cases involving citizens, except for a few charges reserved to the central courts. The profits of justice, as well as rents from civic properties, fines for admission of citizens to the franchises, and tolls on trade, made up the bulk of civic revenues, while the principal expenses were stipends and salaries for city officials, public works and the fee-farm rent to the crown (varying from 200 marks (£134 13s 4d) per annum for Dublin to £10 for Naas). The ceremonial regalia used on public occasions symbolised the devolution of power by the crown to the civities: the king’s sword in the cases of Dublin, Drogheda, Waterford and Limerick, and the maces, borne by special bearers. The processions of civic dignitaries in their hats and liveries in order of importance marked the privileged orders apart within their communities.⁷

The stratification of the corps of civic officials and the range of their duties depended on the size of the population of the urban centre. At its most basic, the borough administration had at its head a sovereign, provost, portreeve (reeve) or mayor, usually elected annually. In the major towns there were two bailiffs or sheriffs to implement the courts’ decisions and to carry out a range of administrative functions. In Dublin the mayor, who normally received an annual stipend of £30, had many responsibilities: he was clerk of the markets, justice of labourers, justice of the peace and of jail delivery, justice of weights and measures, assizer of bread and ale, justice of taverners and escheator during his busy year of office. In the other cities the mayors had some or most of these responsibilities. Civic order rested on the implementation of by-laws passed at regular meetings of common councils. These addressed the gamut of urban-dwellers’ concerns, including the supply of food to the markets or shambles, the piping in of pure water, the maintenance of standards of hygiene in public places, the provision of services for the poor or homeless, the punishment of crime, the protection of the town from internal disaster such as fire, and the provision for defence against external attack. Diverse officials carried out these functions, from important appointees such as town clerks, recorders and constables, down through the ranks of water-bailiffs, beadles of the poor, gate-keepers and clock-keepers to casual labourers such as porters or carters.⁸

The small ruling groups of patricians in the major boroughs by 1500 comprised affluent merchant families. As the crown devolved more and more governing powers to the corporations, these leading citizens were best positioned to benefit politically and economically. In the two largest cities, Dublin and Waterford, with perhaps the widest trading networks, the number of families achieving elevated civic office over a two- to three-generational span was comparatively high: up to thirty or forty in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, indicating a fair degree of openness of the ruling coteries. By contrast, the smaller cities—Galway, Drogheda, Limerick, Cork and Kilkenny—were dominated by elites of twelve to fifteen families. In all cases, however, the men and women of the patriciates were closely linked through intermarriage. Marital alliances between the leading families provided the social axes of the higher stratum: alliances between Sedgrave and Ball family members, Rothes and Shees, Arthurs and Creaghs, Sherlocks and Walshes were very common in Dublin, Kilkenny, Limerick and Waterford respectively. Such consolidation of political power and mercantile wealth tended to strengthen the fabric of urban life, even in times of economic or political difficulty. Where new families came into the nexus, usually through trade or migration, they were absorbed into the larger civic communities. By contrast, some towns were dominated and given commercial identity by one family: the Creans in Sligo, for example, and the Pettits in Mullingar. Besides tightening social bonds within cities, nuptial arrangements fostered close ties between county gentry families in the hinterlands and the urban elites.⁹

To achieve political office at the highest level was nearly impossible for those who were not of the wealthiest group in urban society, and this was more or less exclusively mercantile. An office-holder had to make good from his own pocket any monetary losses incurred during his term. The ascendancy of affluent merchants in civic government was institutionalised in the large boroughs where the merchant guilds dominated councils as well as markets. The wealth of this elite group, protected both by their guild privileges and the chartered rights granted by the crown, is attested not only by intermarriage with the gentry but also by the lavish domestic furnishings listed in inventories of, say, the Blakes of Galway or the Stanihursts of Dublin. But private wealth may not always have betokened municipal prosperity. In the later fifteenth century major civic projects in the large towns were scarce, while smaller centres such as Thurles, Trim and Naas found it hard to retain their urban identity. Although there were signs of architectural vigour in Kilkenny with the construction of the tholsel and in Galway with the building of the church of St Nicholas, most new building projects were undertaken for private patrons, such as the James Rice chapel in Waterford or the Burnell bequest in Dublin. Towns had very small budgets and could easily be overshadowed by other corporations such as guilds, chantries or monasteries. Thus while private wealth in the hands of rich patricians was accumulating rapidly in the late Middle Ages, most borough corporations were appealing plaintively to the crown for the alleviation of their distress.¹⁰

The royal government was prepared to countenance these pleas from the corporations of Ireland because it wished to ensure ordered local administration in the hands of reliable and worthy patricians. The principal families played a leading part in forging civic cohesion and identity through their marriages, their business partnerships and their participation in the annual round of urban rituals. In late medieval cities the wealthiest citizens lived in the central areas, influencing the design of streetscapes with their stone or cagework residences. The most prominent were commemorated in the naming of large houses or inns, such as Blakeney’s Inns and Preston’s Inns in Dublin. In marcher towns, such as Carlingford, Ardee, Trim, Naas, Newcastle Lyons and Dalkey as well some Ormond centres, merchant families in the fifteenth century built castellated homes, the equivalent of the rural tower-houses. These defensive properties were more than decorative, as attested by the high number of burnings of urban settlements in that era. Attachment to parish was embodied in the church monuments such as tombs and wall plaques which were inscribed with the names of patricians and their family connections. Street, parish and ward—in which the patricians as senior councillors organised tax payment, defence and law enforcement—these were the arenas in which the socially ascendant lorded it over the less privileged. These included apprentices, humbler artisans, manual labourers and the band of beggars and unattached. Out from the centre—and outside the walls in the suburbs of the larger towns—the wooden dwellings and other insubstantial structures indicated the areas of urban impoverishment and lack of privilege.¹¹

As with many of their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, late fifteenth-century Irish towns needed an influx of migrants to maintain the urban population at a sufficiently high level to run institutions such as corporations, guilds and other bodies. Thus newcomers to apprenticeships within the guilds and as marital partners for existing families were encouraged, but poor immigrants and those of Gaelic origin were not. Civic by-laws attempted to prevent the entry of those latter groups, with varying degrees of success and commitment. At times of difficulty in the rural economy the attractions of the town were manifest: freedom from seigneurial exactions, opportunities for advancement through the guild system, and the availability of at least minimal welfare institutions. To city authorities, charged with defending the community against physical assault and infection, the checking of strangers at the gates was a matter of urgency. The offic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Town and County in the English Part of Ireland, c. 1500
• Chapter 2: Society and Culture in Gaelic Ireland
• Chapter 3: The Kildares and their Critics, 1500–20
• Chapter 4: Kildare Power and Tudor Intervention, 1520–35
• Chapter 5: Religion and Reformation, 1500–40
• Chapter 6: Political and Religious Reform and Reaction, 1536–56
• Chapter 7: The Pale and Greater Leinster, 1556–88
• Chapter 8: Munster: Presidency and Plantation, 1565–95
• Chapter 9: Connacht: Council and Composition, 1569–95
• Chapter 10: Ulster and the General Crisis of the Nine Years’ War, 1560–1603
• Chapter 11: From Reformation to Counter-Reformation, 1560–1600
• References
• Bibliographical Guide
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Currency and Dating
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill & Macmillan